Archives for June 2013

Hitting that snooze button in the morning provides all kinds of immediate gratifying sensations: silence after your blaring alarm, cozying back into your blankets, and not having to think about starting your day for another five — oh, who are we kidding — 20 minutes.

However, those short fragments of sleep in the morning do more harm than good. With your body competing to release dopamine (a wake-up neurotransmitter) as your alarm goes off and serotonin (a sleepytime neurotransmitter) as you throw the covers back over your head, you start your day with an internal chemical mishmash that can leave you feeling groggy — and make it harder, rather than easier, to get out of bed. Gizmodo describes these downsides and more.

Frederic "Tilly" Tillotson, chair of the music department (1936-1963).

The Portland Symphony Orchestra’s 2013 Fourth of July Concert, which last year attracted 60,000 people, will feature “The Bowdoin College Medley,” an 8 1/2 minute score that draws from familiar Bowdoin songs.

T. Douglas Stenberg ’56 (“Terry”) has worked for two years to come up with the score for the Bowdoin Medley, and at his own expense he engaged the Portland Symphony to record the piece. “It is a labor of love,” describes John Cross ’76, secretary of development and college relations, “and a tribute to Bowdoin’s tradition as a ‘singing college’ and to long-time Music Department faculty member Fred Tillotson (known affectionately as “Tilly”).

In America, boys are twice as likely to be held back in school as girls, four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention disorders, and five times as likely to be expelled from preschool. They go on to make up only 43% of college students. Additionally, a study published in the Journal of Human Resources suggests that teachers’ perceptions of these behaviors affect their grading. But rather than simply writing off the male gender as disruptive of the traditional classroom atmosphere, The Atlantic suggests using teaching practices that take advantage of the “high energy” and “thirst for competition” that many boys display in order to teach them better. Read about these practices and how they may benefit both sexes.

This summer two Bowdoin students are interacting with the subjects they study in some their economics, government and education classes — those who are living in poverty and facing crises that can come with financial vulnerability.

By interning at the Maine Volunteer Lawyers Project, Caroline Blake ’14 and Joe Sherlock ’16 are also benefiting from, and contributing to, a longstanding partnership between the college and the agency. Since the agency was founded in 1983, hundreds of Bowdoin students — often aspiring lawyers — have volunteered or interned there, according to Lin Martin-Hunt, who coordinates the organization’s student and community volunteers.

Both Sherlock and Blake have Preston Public Interest Career grants, from Bowdoin’s funded internship program, to pursue what would have been an unpaid internship. Bowdoin’s donor-funded grants, overseen by Career Planning, allow students to explore possible careers during the summer.

Please bear with us while we retroactively post obituaries from back issues of Bowdoin Magazine. This process has currently skewed the chronology of our listings. We're working to fix the problem. In the meantime, please go to bowdoinobituaries.com and search by class year.